October, 2008

Luke and I went to one of our favorite restaurants, The Gathering, today. Our table was beside the window. We saw the same familiar faces we always see. The waiter took our order. The middle-aged, rather hip blonde woman who has been working there since Luke and I first visited the restaurant was doing the crossword at the end of the counter. I ordered a burger and Luke ordered half a turkey sandwich. While we were waiting for our order both Luke and I picked up on the conversation the hip crossword woman was having with the gay waiters. She told them she was voting yes on Prop. 8 because marriage was a religious ceremony and she didn’t want her church forced to marry two gay people and especially more than two gay people at the same time. Then she laughed. Our food arrived. I asked our waiter, he’d been conversing with the hip crossword woman, if she was playing devil’s advocate or if she was really going to vote yes on Prop. 8? He said he wished she was playing devil’s advocate but she was serious. She was going to vote against my right to stay married.

The fact that this woman could talk within earshot of the man I love and married on August 9, 2008, after being together with him for 24 years, and the fact that she has a vote, yes a vote, about whether I can or cannot stay married to Luke struck me as a violation of everything I know about myself as an American. It’s humiliating. First of all, the very idea that the people in the state of California get to vote on my rights to stay married is madness. And secondly, leave me the hell alone Mormon Church. You have funded close to 70% of the campaign that wants to take away my marriage rights. What the fuck have I done to you? Keep your hands off me, my life and my marriage.

“I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”

Tonight was the final debate. It all comes down to this — today I streamed a video from The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s site, (thanks Andrew) – Barack was walking through a neighborhood greeting residents when a woman told him he had a spider on his shirt. He didn’t even flinch. He said, “how big is it,” and looked down at his white shirt. He laughed. He picked at and finally flicked the spider off his shirt. Calmness doesn’t do his spider moment justice. He was mesmerized, totally focused on the spider for 10 seconds. That video was exactly how the debate went for me tonight. I watched Obama flick McCain off. Boy, McCain sure has a big steam roller head and his black eyes are as big as dinner plates. He twitched and twisted but he didn’t flick Obama off. If you are reading this site then you don’t need me to go line by line and counter all the lies McCain told tonight. Let’s just leave it at this — three weeks from this very day we will know who the next President is. Can you sing, “itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout, down came the rain and washed the spider out.”

Today I watched a video of a young white boy entering a McCain/Palin rally in Ohio with his parents. He said, “you need gloves to touch him” referring to Barack Obama. “You need gloves to touch him.” His parents laughed when he said it. The boy was no older than 8 or 9. Don’t tell me that kind of talk isn’t dangerous. This should and will be McCain’s legacy, his unbridled, hate-mongering campaign, the campaign he keeps pursuing then backing away from. If Obama was holding rallies in front of crowds of black people who called McCain a ’terrorist’ and yelled ‘kill him’ referring to McCain, Obama would be in jail. But McCain/Palin smile and wave at the crowds as people yell ‘nigger’ and ‘behead him’ about Obama. Why is that? And why haven’t the Clintons denounced McCain? Why did it take David Gergen on CNN to bring up the possibility of violence growing out of the McCain rallies? I’ve used up all the energy I can muster writing about Bill and Hillary Clinton and their blind ambition tour of the past 2 years. I trust they end up in the same political trash heap as McCain and Palin.

McCain and Palin have unleashed a monster. Trouble is, it didn’t take them long to do it. The monster is just under the surface, scratch and sniff and it comes out of hiding, looking for someone to blame for the mess our country is in. Hitler found a monster to blame in the 1930s. That was only 80 years ago.